Evidence of meeting #27 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was offices.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:05 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Diane Marleau
Welcome to the committee.
Our witnesses today are officials from the Canada Revenue Agency who are here to talk to us about the turnover rate within their department and their decision-making processes, with particular emphasis on how office locations are chosen and set up. This is an issue of particular interest to us at this time.
Ms. Gauvin, you can begin by introducing yourself, to give everyone some context.
9:05 a.m.
Lysanne Gauvin Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Good morning and thank you, Madam Chair.
My colleague Mr. Claude Bourget is accompanying me today.
Claude is director general, human resources transformation and corporate management, and he works with me. My name is Lysanne Gauvin. I'm the assistant commissioner for the human resources branch of the Canada Revenue Agency.
We're pleased to be here today to provide you with some information regarding the geographic distribution and turnover rate of employees at the Canada Revenue Agency, or the CRA.
The CRA's employees are distributed across Canada. Approximately 80% of CRA's work force resides in our five regions with the remaining at headquarters. Our employees are primarily located in our eight tax centres and 43 tax service offices. Our employee population increases to approximately 43,000 when we are in the tax-filing period.
Small fluctuations in geographical distributions occur as we implement business modernization initiatives and increase our use of new technologies. Due to the cyclical and seasonal nature of the tax-filing season, the CRA makes significant use of term employees ranging from about 5,000 to 10,000 employees at different points in time during a given year.
Like the broader service, the CRA continues to experience a significant shift to knowledge-based work. Over the last seven years, our relative numbers of processing staff have dropped by approximately 21%, whereas the percentage of auditors, computer specialists, and program officers and such has increased.
The majority of our hiring is done by regional operations, and they are well equipped to hire and train individuals. Last fiscal year, we hired approximately 2,300 indeterminate employees. Many of the term employees we hire are rehired from one year to the next. Hence, we have ongoing access to a knowledgeable and skilled group of employees.
Where it makes good business sense to do so, we draw upon our talented term employees to staff indeterminate positions. More than 50% of indeterminate hirings come from our term employees. As well, we do recruit from other government departments. They represent about 21% of last year's indeterminate hirings. About 17% of last year's indeterminate new hires came from outside the federal government.
In the locations where our tax centres exist, we are often a major employer who plays an important role in the local communities. We do not currently have difficulties in attracting new hires; however, we follow this very closely.
Given the specialized nature of our organization, we are well known as a major employer of auditors and IT specialists. In these areas, we are not currently having difficulty in attracting staff. We are experiencing some challenges, however, in finding and retaining human resources staff, and financial and information services staff in the National Capital Region.
The agency's workforce is diversified. Our workforce reflects the potential availability of employees in all employment equity target areas based on the 2001 labour market availability (LMA) census information. We are waiting for new census data to reveal what demographic changes have occurred since 2001. Where there are specific areas in which we do not need target representation rates, we undertake recruitment processes to find qualified target member candidates.
Because of our geographical distribution, CRA employees have a high degree of second language proficiency and across Canada we provide services in both official languages.
We have a high retention rate of about 95% of our employees, which means that we have a low attrition rate of about 5%, including retirements. Many of our employees make their careers in the agency, due to the scope of the work we do, the size of our organization, the challenging work we provide, and the personal work-life balance we offer. For example, where operational requirements permit, we offer options such as flexible work hours, the opportunity to work from home, and compressed work schedules.
The CRA will face significant demographic challenges in the coming years. Our knowledge workers are growing older and will increasingly be eligible to retire. Currently, approximately 18% of our workforce is over the age of 55 years. Our projections tell us that this will continue to rise and will reach 21.5% by 2012. Our retirement rate currently stands at 3% and is projected to climb to 3.7% by 2012. Quite naturally, we are tracking these developments closely, and in order to mitigate potential risks, we are taking a number of steps to attract new talent and to recruit more strategically. For example, in our call centres we hire staff who meet the educational requirements of other parts of the organization and have an interest in moving on.
Last fiscal year, we employed approximately 1,200 students. These students are progressively offered more challenging assignments with the goal, where appropriate, of their returning and eventually seeking rewarding careers with the agency. We are also increasing our visibility on campuses, including using students who have worked for the CRA as student ambassadors.
The CRA has always had a reputation of “growing its talent” and nourishing long-term careers. Again, due to the specialized nature of our work, it takes time and considerable effort (6% of salary base and educational assistance) to develop our employees through targeted learning and development assignment opportunities.
We also strive to ensure that knowledge is and will be transferred from our senior and experienced staff to less experienced staff through coaching and mentoring activities. We continue to improve our management development programs to ensure that we have strong leadership to guide us through these challenging times. We also have structured succession planning in place for the executive level. Over the next year, this approach will begin to be implemented across the agency.
In all of the agency's talent management undertakings—recruiting new staff, developing our employees, putting retention strategies in place—we ensure that the agency's core values of integrity, professionalism, respect, cooperation, and ethics are safeguarded so that Canadians will continue to trust the agency.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.
We have also shared with you a deck that we prepared for the committee to give members some demographic information.
I'll turn it back over to you.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Diane Marleau
Thank you very much.
We will start with Mr. Holland for seven minutes.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for coming today.
I want to start, if I could, with your retention rate. You state that you have a retention rate at CRA of 95% and that the 5% attrition rate includes retirements. That seems to be an extremely high number. Can you talk to me about how you defined that 95% retention rate, when you talked about that rate?
9:15 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
When talking about a 95% retention rate, it might be easier for me to tell you about our loss rate. What we include in our loss rate are people who retire, who have become eligible for retirement and have chosen to retire. We also include in the 5% the employees who have chosen to leave the agency for whatever reason. They could have opted to go back to school, they could have opted to go to work for an organization in the private sector or another other government departments, or they could have decided to stay at home.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
I understand that. What I'm getting at is, over what period of time, because 95% is your retention rate for what? Per year? What timeframe are you measuring that by?
9:15 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
That happens to be for 2006-07. If you look at the deck--
9:15 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
That's an annual rate, and it has varied from 2001-02 to 1996-97, from a high of 96.9% to a low of 94.9%.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
How does that vary by region? Is that attrition rate particularly higher in given regions? I know one of the things we looked at with some other departments is that sometimes those attrition rates are higher in certain areas--mainly the urban areas and rural areas. Or has that not been the case with CRA?
9:15 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
We do have variations by regions, absolutely. We have a chart of—
9:15 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Well, I'm not a statistician, so I'll hesitate to use the word “significant”. I'll give you the low for the 2006-07 fiscal year. The low was in the national capital region, our headquarters, at 93.1%, and the high that year was in the Atlantic region, at 96.2%.
9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
I'll move on from that. Thank you. That's very helpful.
Given that most of the interactions people are having with CRA are by telephone or increasingly over the Internet, and most people are filing electronically--I know you want to encourage people to do that because obviously it reduces your workload--can you tell me if you're thinking of any further strategies of moving into other more economically depressed regions, or what your plan is with respect to distribution of your workforce, the 44,000 employees you have?
9:15 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
As I think you're aware, we have tax centres across the country. Some of our tax centres are located in areas that might meet the criterion of being economically challenged. We do have excess capacity in our existing tax centres, so what we are trying to do in order to maintain the workforce we have in our tax centres, is to move existing work or new work to those existing tax centres. I am not aware that we have any plans at this point in time to open up new offices. We have a pretty strong geographic distribution across the country, and I'm not aware of any plans to open up new offices.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
Where is that overcapacity principally? Is that evenly distributed? Or is it principally—
9:20 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
All of our tax centres have overcapacity, absolutely.
9:20 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Part of it was driven, I think, over the years through the technological changes that were made to the processing of the tax returns. The example that you use of giving the taxpayers the ability to file electronically over the Internet was one driver. Certainly the implementation of 2-D bar coding on the tax returns has also had an impact in terms of the volume of data processing and manual work that has been done in the past in our tax centres.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
I ask this more for confirmation than anything else. Just to be certain, I know that a number of companies are collecting a lot of data and processing it over the Internet or outsourcing some of their functions outside of Canada, in many cases. That is not something that CRA is contemplating. Perhaps you could confirm that.
9:20 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
No, we're not contemplating that, and I think we're very conscious of the fact that Canadian taxpayers, be they individuals, corporations, non-profits, trusts, or whatever the circumstance is, give us extremely personal data. The impact of maintaining privacy on that data is certainly one of the big things we focus on.
9:20 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Holland Liberal Ajax—Pickering, ON
There would be a lot of security concerns, and certainly we would have those concerns.
Do you see the issues in terms of overcapacity continuing? In other words, you have a certain amount of overcapacity now. How are you planning into the future if more and more Canadians adopt using the Internet as a method of filing their taxes and that continually reduces your workload? Are you putting that into your plan in terms of how you deal with overcapacity? Most of the time, one of the ways you can deal with overcapacity is through attrition, through not rehiring people who have left. But if you have attrition rates that are that high, it makes it harder to deal with the overcapacity.
Maybe you could talk about your plan to deal with the current overcapacity and how you see that overcapacity moving forward as a trend.
9:20 a.m.
Assistant Commissioner, Human Resources Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Right now we have managed to put in place activities that pretty well maintain the status of employment for full-time employees. I'm not aware at this point in time that we're going to have very significant changes on the technological side that will have big impacts on our workforce, especially in the tax centres.